Vehicular parking laws are usually enforced by issuing a summons and placing the summons on the vehicle. Typically, the owner of the vehicle reviews the summons and is then required to inquire as to the fine, pay the fine and/or appear in court to contest the summons. The enforcement of the payment of the fines is haphazard in that in many instances the vehicle owner either does not pay the fine within a reasonable timeframe mandated by a municipal ordinance or statute, (e.g., such as 24 hours or 2 weeks from the date of ticket issuance) or does not pay the fine at all.
The fines and penalties assessed often increase substantially for repeat violators who are termed scofflaws—people who ignore such summons. The unpaid tickets from these motorists, regardless of their legal scofflaw status, prompts a shift of effort and resources because their status requires the municipality to adjust from a mode of enforcement of parking rules to one of collection of unpaid debts often using a conventional vehicular related debt collection program.
Further, conventional vehicular-related debt collection programs, such as collection procedures used for parking tickets, or automotive personal property taxes, generally use notices mailed through the general post to deliver either official notice of a debt as part of an adjudication or court summons process, or as a general notification of outstanding debt in order to prompt payment. These notices are usually printed, mailed, handled and tracked by a different department, and/or personnel than those involved in the enforcement effort, making it difficult to track the efficacy of either party's work and the subsequent positive effects on the other (such as a mailed notice campaign's effect on parking compliance, windshield payment rates, or overall delinquencies).
Furthermore, these traditional mailed notices are limited in their ability to succeed by the inconsistency of up-to-date physical address information at the data source, which in most cases, is the entity responsible for the registration of the vehicle, such as a Department of Motor Vehicles. This is especially true in the case of inter-state collections where an out-of-state motor vehicle registration entity is required to be queried in order to get a physical address for which to deliver notice. A lack of inter-state communication in regards to municipal debt has led to an absence of reciprocity in the collection efforts and although interstate registration information is often available to a municipal collection program it often requires third party or private contractors to facilitate the exchange of data between states and/or limits any actual legal action beyond official notification because of the lack of reciprocity (e.g. license registration, suspicion/revocation points on license, etc., all of which are often-used tools for in-state collections). In the absence of consistently correct and functionally attainable vehicle registrant addresses for mailing a notice to, the target of the notice is for all intents and purposes, unreachable; thereby causing this costly traditional collection process to fail in many cases.
One solution to insure payment of fines is to place a “boot” on a vehicle's wheel. Such a boot is a device that is attached to the vehicle wheel to render operation of the vehicle impossible since the wheel is no longer able to roll due to the presence of the boot. Such boots are commonly used and widely available, but are typically cumbersome and heavy, and may be an extreme measure for an offender who only has one or two outstanding violations, or where an offender has violations that he/she is not aware of. Thus, the alleged violator may not know of any outstanding violations and be subject to a boot placed on his/her vehicle, causing severe inconveniences.
Furthermore, in some municipalities, legislation has been enacted by ordinance, or through formal or informal policy, to require successful mailed notification to any vehicle registrant of their scofflaw status before an immobilization or towing action can be taken with regard to a particular vehicle. A “Catch-22” situation is thus created in instances where a physical address cannot be ascertained by the parties responsible for collection, despite that the registrants' vehicle is accessible, potentially on a daily basis, by those parties responsible for enforcement, and whereas this same vehicle may continue to collect parking citations despite both the motorists unwillingness to pay them, and the municipalities ability to prompt payment through legal action.
Accordingly, there is a need in the industry for a method and system for ensuring that a person with currently unpaid or outstanding vehicle parking violation debts to receive adequate notice that there are violation fees or fines that are due or past due, before other extreme measures are taken, such as placing a boot on the vehicle, towing/impounding and/or revocation of the person's license while retaining the ability to track the successful delivery of such notices to vehicle registrants with more confidence than provided by the sending of a registered letter through the post office.